In this case-study, I examine examples which fall within the five categories of the re-use of texts in the Nyāya Sūtra, Nyāya Bhāṣya, and Nyāya Vārttika and note the form of quoting and embedment. It is found that the re-use of texts is prominent and that the category and method of embedding the re-used passages varies from author to author. Gautama embeds the most interlanguage quotations without acknowledging his sources and Uddyotakara re-uses the most quotations and paraphrases while acknowledging his (...) sources. Vātsyāyana re-uses the most direct quotations but only acknowledges his sources about half the time. Each author re-uses textual material for two reasons: to demonstrate his authority in this field; and to support his own arguments and to critique objections and opposing theories. Differences crop up in the methodologies of Gautama, Vātsyāyana, and Uddyotakara as the concept of an authority shifts over time, as the body of literature grows, and as new objections and opponents arise. (shrink)

The propositional content of a reference is the proposition attributing to the referent the properties that correspond to the nouns and modifiers in the reference (for example, the propositional content of `Mary' is that the referent is named`Mary'). During language comprehension, the hearer or reader must determine the set of beliefs with respect to which the propositional content of a reference is to be understood. In the prototypical case, this set consists of the propositions that she believes that the speaker (...) or writer believes that she and the speaker or writer mutually believe. This paper identifies two contexts in which the propositional content of a specific reference is not understood with respect to this set--subjective and objective sentences in third-person fictional narrative text--and identifies some implications of this for understanding specific references in these contexts. (shrink)

While many authors have written about the undertone of violence present throughout Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," little has been said about the specific references in the story to the Civil War. These references, though, serve to highlight questions concerning evil, guilt, and punishment that come to the fore especially in the culminating scene between the grandmother and The Misfit. In the end, the story seems to be suggesting, trying to determine the (...) fittingness of the evils we encounter may best be seen as a further manifestation of the pride that precipitated our original Fall; these are matters best left to God's judgment, not to ours. (shrink)

During dialog, references are presented, accepted, and potentially reused. Two experiments were conducted to examine reuse in a naturalistic setting. In Experiment 1, where the participants interacted face to face, self-presented references and references accepted through verbatim repetition were reused more. Such biases persisted after the end of the interaction. In Experiment 2, where the participants interacted over the phone, reference reuse mainly depended on whether the participant could see the landmarks being referred to, although this bias (...) seemed to be only transient. Consistent with the memory-based approach to dialog, these results shed light on how differences in accessibility in memory affect the unfolding of the interaction. (shrink)

Abstract This paper deals with three references found in John Wyclif's unpublished De scientia Dei to a certain Tractatus 13 , whose title relates to the position it holds in the first book of Wyclif's Summa de ente . They are puzzling references, since the first book of the Summa is made up barely of seven tracts. In this paper I argue that the three references are actually linking devices to the final section of the De ente (...) praedicamentali (ch. 19-22). Moreover, I maintain that, at the time of the compilation of his De scientia Dei , Wyclif conceived the first book of his Summa as containing thirteen tracts, the last seven of which later collected under a single item (viz. the De ente praedicamentali ). This allows for a broader and more consistent account of the order and dating of the De scientia Dei (1372) and other Wyclif's writings. (shrink)

Adding to A.O. Aldridge’s 1951 list, this list of British eighteenth-century references to Shaftesbury provides further evidence that the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is an important rival to Lockean empiricism during the early and middle decades of the century. The peak of Shaftesbury’s influence occurs during the 1740’s and 1750’s when the deist controversy was at its height. A more conservative political and religious climate of opinion after 1759 is one reason for the decline of Shaftesbury’s reputation as (...) a philosopher. Another is Shaftesbury’s displacement by Hume as an important enemy of orthodox Christianity. During the 1760’s and later, Hume is attacked by the Scottish “common sense” philosophers, who find anticipations of Humean scepticism in Locke and Berkeley (but not in Shaftesbury), thereby unwittingly helping to provide the foundation for the eventual establishment of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as the “big three” of eighteenth-century philosophy. (shrink)

The cognitive resolution of references depends on whether an anaphor has previously been mentioned in the antecedent text or whether a relation between the anaphor and the antecedent has to be constructed by means of an inference. This inference process in comparison with a mere concept repetition produces an increase in reading and comprehension time. In the present paper aspects of this processing difference are examined. Recognition data are used in addition to reading and comprehension times in order to (...) compare the mental representations generated by the different processes. Experiment I shows that the differences in processing time not only depend on the repetition of the concept, but are also produced by varying the semantic distance between concepts. Differences in recognition performance were not observed, indicating that the resulting text representations were similar on a semantic level. In Experiment 2 the point of time of the inference process during text processing was determined by a word-by-word presentation. The results show that the inference process starts immediately after the reception of the critical reference concept and ends with the completion of the proposition. Finally, Experiment 3 examines whether inference processes are different after specification or generalization of a previously mentioned concept. Here the inference effect occurs with specification rather than generalisation. The recognition data indicate that it is questionable whether an inference process takes place when a concept is generalised. (shrink)

Vague References to Quantities as a Face-Saving Strategy in Teacher-Student Interaction The main focus of the present paper is to show how vague language categories can function as a face-saving strategy. The observations made in this article are based on the analysis of one category of vague language, that is, quantifiers in British and American spoken academic discourse. The data used for the present investigation have been obtained from two corpora: the sub-corpus of educational events of the British National (...) Corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken Discourse. The results suggest that quantifiers as a face-saving strategy are used when self-criticism or criticism towards others is expressed. They are often employed in apologies, promises, self-justifications, when giving advice and in cases of uncertainty. Both students and teachers use quantifiers in these situations, but in teachers' speech they are of special importance, since teachers, if they want to maintain their authority, are especially conscious of their positive face. Paucal quantifiers especially frequently function as a face-saving device since they have a mitigating effect. The use of quantifiers as mitigators is especially evident in those instances where they occur in negative contexts. Such instances demonstrate that the main difference between the two varieties under investigation is that in BE quantifiers significantly more frequently function as mitigators. Finally, it has been observed that quantifiers frequently occur alongside other means of self-distancing and face-saving in both varieties. (shrink)

An employer asked to provide a reference for a former or departing employee is confronted with a number of complex legal and ethical concerns. The issue of references is always controversial, involving a balance of employers' fears of legal liability, interests in providing relevant information to prospective employers, and concerns for fairness to former employees. Recently this topic has been the focus of new attention as the result of a court decision holding a former employer legally liable for wrongs (...) committed by a former employee in a new job. In that case, the former employer had provided a positive reference while neglecting to note certain negative aspects of the former employee'sperformance. This paper addresses legal and ethical aspects of the reference dilemma and incorporates responses of human resource professionals to the question of ethical reference policies and practices. (shrink)

This page contains references to the key original papers on the longstanding debate about the completeness of Quantum Mechanics (QM), particularly Bell's Theorem. It is not intended to be a definitive collection or exposition on the matter. Quite the opposite, it is limited to the 3 essential papers in the series, which were written over a nearly 50 year time span. These amazing papers lay out a complex line of reasoning involving our fundamental understanding of reality in the physical (...) sense. Each is brilliant and ground-breaking in its own right, building to a powerful conclusion regarding the matter. (shrink)

The paper offers a survey of the debate on the introduction, in the Preamble of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, of references to God and Europe’s Christian tradition. It examines the question of European identity and values which motivates these proposals in relation to (1) the nature of the EU as an essentially political construction; (2) the issue of human rights in the EU; (3) the protection of cultural and religious diversity within the EU. The study shows (...) that the confessionalization of Europe promoted by strong churches on the Continent, which are legitimate actors of civil society, betray a failure to understand the logic of the European construction. To the extent to which they represent an attempt to secure a privileged position with respect to other religious or non-religious actors, they run against the functional principles and values of the Union. (shrink)

This paper deals with forward references (also called kataphoric references) in natural language. In order to calculate truth conditions for sentences that involve kataphoric references, an extension of Discourse Representation Theory, PATIENT DRT, is proposed, inspired by so-called backpatching techniques for the parsing of programming languages. The main idea is that a kataphoric element introduces an incomplete discourse entity, to be completed by subsequent material under certain conditions. This approach is applicable to pronominal as well as complex (...) Noun Phrases, and has no special difficulties with crossing co-references. The main virtue of this approach is that it allows parsing of kataphors from left to right, which makes it suitable for on-line language processing by computer and plausible as an element of a theory of human language processing as well. However, the approach suggests that a left-to-right treatment of kataphoric constructions is hard to reconcile with the requirements of compositionality. (shrink)

This thesis articulates a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s explication of the being (Seins) of gear (Zeugs) in §15 of his masterwork Being and Time (1927/2006) and develops and applies the position attributed to Heidegger to explain three phenomena of unreflective action discussed in recent literature and articulate a partial Heideggerian ecological metaphysics. Since §15 of BT explicates the being of gear, Part 1 expounds Heidegger’s concept of the ‘being’ (Seins) of beings (Seienden) and two issues raised in the ‘preliminary methodological (...) remark’ in §15 of BT regarding explicating being. §1.1 interprets the being (Sein) or synonymously constitution of being (Seinsverfassung) of a being (Seienden) as a regional essence: a property unifying a region (Region), district (Bezirk), or subject-area (Sachgebiet) – a highly general (‘regional’) class of entities. Although Heidegger posits two components of the being of a being, viz. material-content (Sachhaltigkeit, Sachgehalt) and mode-of-being (Seinsart) or way-of-being (Seinsweise, Weise des Seins, Weise zu sein) (1927/1975, 321), the unclarity of this distinction means that it does not figure prominently herein. §1.2 addresses Heidegger’s distinction between ontological and ontic investigations and his notion of ‘modes of access’ (Zugangsarten, Zugangsweisen). Part 2 expounds §15 of BT’s explication of the being of gear. §2.1 analyses Heidegger’s two necessary and sufficient conditions for being gear and three core basic concepts (Grundbegriffe) enabling comprehension of these conditions and therewith a foundational comprehension of gear. Heidegger explicates the being of gear through content of unreflectively purposeful, non-intersubjective intentional states. I term such states ‘mundane concern’, which is almost synonymous with Hubert Dreyfus’s term ‘absorbed coping’ (1991, 69). Heidegger’s explication highlights around-for references (Um-zu-Verweisungen) as the peculiar species of property figuring in mundanely concernful intentional content. §2.2 clarifies Heidegger’s position on the relationship between to-hand-ness (Zuhandenheit) and extantness (Vorhandenheit) in the narrow sense: two of Heidegger’s most widely discussed concepts. I reject Kris McDaniel’s recent reading of Heidegger as affirming that nothing could be both to-hand and extant simultaneously (McDaniel 2012). Part 3 develops and applies Heidegger’s phenomenology of mundane concern. §3.1 explains the phenomena of situational holism, situated normativity, and mundanely concernful prospective control. §3.2 undertakes the metaphysical accommodation of around-for references, which §3.1 posited as featuring prominently within mundanely concernful intentional content. This thesis thus contributes not only to Heidegger scholarship, but also to contemporary debates within the philosophy of action and cognitive science. (shrink)